By Lewis MacKenzie,

The Ottawa CitizenOctober 17, 2010 12:04 PM

Hot on the heels of losing out in the competition (barter-fest) for one of the non-permanent seats on the 15-seat UN Security Council, talking heads bemoaned the fact and heaped criticism on our government of the day and our foreign policy. The government itself screwed up by blaming the Leader of the Opposition for opining that Canada (his country) didn’t deserve a seat on the Security Council. Mind you, a CBC reporter canvassing the General Assembly members following the vote couldn’t find anyone who was aware of what Michael Ignatieff had said.

Permit me to preface my following comments with a few words to bear in mind while I vent: Somalia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Kosovo, Darfur, Sierra Leone, North Korea, Iraq, Iran – you get the picture.

When the UN was born in 1945, the so-called winners of the Second World War joined forces to save us all from “the scourge of war” – the United States, Russia, China (the wrong one but that was sorted out in due course), the U.K. and France. The latter wasn’t really a winner but got a sympathy vote and was appointed to the club to humiliate the Germans and create a balance of power in continental Europe.

They decided to call themselves the Permanent Five (Perm 5), agreed they would not fight each other in the future, gave themselves a veto over matters dealing with international peace and security that might draw them into a conflict – and in the fine print also issues of procedure within the Security Council. In other words, they would decide who would share the seats in that hallowed chamber, for how long (two years seemed like a good solution before the upstart rotating members got too much influence) and how votes would be conducted, while they sat back with the ability to shut down any council decision with their almighty single veto.

Did I just hear an echo, “Darfur” and a veto by China with its oil investments and operations in Sudan?

Again in 1945 – a very good year – the Perm 5 countries agreed that their military forces, including millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of ships and aircraft, including nuclear weapons, would be placed at the disposal of the UN Military Staff Committee. The committee would sit on a regular basis and include the commanders-in-chief of the Perm 5 military forces. Some 65 years later this committee has never met at the commander-in-chief level.

When the Berlin wall came down in 1989 symbolizing the end of the Cold War, the Perm 5 were sound asleep in spite of warnings from commanders of UN peacekeeping missions in the field that the paradigm had changed and touchy feely, lightly armed peacekeeping missions merely perpetuated various conflicts’ status quo. When one of their field commanders suggested that it was pointless calling the UN after 5:00 p.m. New York time as there was no one there to take the call at the decision-making level (unintentionally smearing the many UN staff working around the clock), the UN knee-jerk reaction was to establish a 24 and 7 “situation room” with absolutely no decision-making capability. But at least there was someone awake to answer the phone. No small improvement.

Canadian supporters of the Security Council – no coincidence, previous ambassadors and the diplomatic corps in general – anguished over our recently failed bid to obtain a temporary, repeat temporary, seat. They suggested that such a seat would provide Canada with influence in important international issues involving peace and security, failing to acknowledge that any opinion regarding such issues could be thwarted by a single, yes a single veto, enshrined in the 1945 protocol.

One even suggested that we would have to dramatically increase the size of our Canadian delegation at the UN (at $150 U.S.-plus per diem on top of salary, entertainment expenses, sky-high accommodation charges, transportation, etc., etc.) because of the necessity to be on call 24 and 7, as crises around the world do not respect the New York time zone.

Try as I might no one at their headquarters in Manhattan could tell me how many Security Council meetings were called outside the cocktail hour at the UN during the past 65 years – in the absence of empirical evidence I confidently assume I have enough fingers to count them.

Forget the Muslim and African blocks who were swayed by ideology (anti-Israel) or a perverse and self-serving perception of diminished foreign aid to vote against Canada’s ill-founded desire to seek a seat on the world’s most dysfunctional committee. In the end we owe Portugal a favour for wrestling that final inglorious seat from our hesitant hands. Fortunately, port trumps maple syrup.

Paradoxically, the UN add-ons, separate from the Security Council and peace and security issues, such as UNICEF, UNESCO, WHO and UNHCR as examples, do outstanding work and Canada will continue to contribute to their successes as we have in the past, absent the pseudo status of a temporary Security Council seat.

Retired general Lewis MacKenzie served on nine UN peacekeeping missions and commanded two of them.

Portugal’s Foreign Minister Luis Amado as members of the United Nations vote on the election of the five non-permanent members of the Security Council, October 12, 2010 during the 65th session of the General Assembly at the United Nations in New York.